OK, First let me say I am new to Limewire and in the early learning stages. I am a 'refugee' from audio galaxy which has recently aquired alot of spyware baggage to which I very stronly object. I no longer choose to support or provide my files for them to share. They will just have to get along without me.

Now my 'newbie' question. I see in my Connections Tab View the number of hosts I am connected to. This varies wildly and seems not to be very stable. Why is that? Also this number is usually aroung 4K or 2K or 6K but NEVER anywhere near the number shown as Current Hosts in the Limewire Statistics Page of the web-site. I seems that I am connected to only a small fraction of the available hosts. Should I be concerned about this?

Thanks for any help

-big sandra

Forgive me, but not only don't I have an answer to your question, but I'd like to piggyback one of my own to this thread.

Even when my host count is shown as zero, very often I still see uploads occurring my disk. And if I haven't misread the meaning of the "time to live" variable, my search requests go out to immediately connected hosts and they in turn the requests to their immediate hosts for as many iterations as is indicated by the "time to live". I interpret this as meaning my request is actually received by a potentially much larger number of peers than the hosts number indicates. This also leads me to wonder whether the files available number has any accuracy.

Is my interpretation correct?

you got me... gthese are all good questions, and we need a little more explaination on how this system is actually working. In the 'theory' of it, presumably, all messages are broadcast to all systems on the network eventually, but I am not sure that that is in fact, implemented, and I am not sure that any given user on the network, is 'seeing' all the other machines on the network at any given time. I say this because I have noticed a sharp drop in users downloading from me, or requesting my files when the hosts i am connected to drops to a small number. There seems to be a correlation between the two, BUT if the system is working as per the theory stated above there shoulbe NOT be a corelation. Presumably I could be connected to only ONE other machine in the network, yet se ALL the machines. A "one to many" relationship...

I know I am not anwsering anything here, just asking more questions. I hope we can get an expert on board here to help us out....

I'm surprised we haven't heard from a developer yet.

I am a bit of a newbie myself but from reading the info pages on web sites like limewire.com i believe the system works as follows. all your search requests goto the other computers you are linked to in the host section of limewire they send on your search requests to other hosts/users and so on. when one of them has the file you want they send that info back and if you download you download the file staright from the computer that has the file you want. you never need to search the whole of the gnutella net as the system is designed to have duplicate copies of files all over the net so that if parts of the gnutella net fall down you can still get the file you want. the point of the gnutella net is that the system is completely decentralised and therefore is unable to be attacked or stopped